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Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Real Message From Apple Apps

Image via CrunchBaseThe real message from iPhone and iPad apps is not that the web is dead, like one magazine put it recently, but that people are willing to pay. Steve Jobs dove into the world of music piracy and created the iTunes store. People were willing to pay, it is just that they like the digital format better, he concluded.

Traditional content producers are in some kind of a fix trying to figure out if there is a living to be made at all. The thing to note is the importance of content has grown, more content is being consumed than ever before, and if people are willing to pay, what gives?

I believe the lesson is the ad models on the web are sorely lacking. For all the data collection and social sophistication, the ads that get served are still so hit and miss.

People are willing to pay, but pay walls are a terribly bad idea. The web is not newspaper hawking by the street corner. People give you their attention. They give you their purchasing intents. How much more do you want? People are already paying.

In The News

Jeff Jarvis: What should Google do? Google and its algorithms are now a set of laws of the web and if you intervene in one way, you may trigger the law of unintended consequences in another. ..... whether we want Google to be the cop of the world. Google has been sued by companies it decreed were link-bating spammer sites, downgrading them in search ..... We don’t want bad guys to game search. .... Google, especially, wants to — in Cutts’ words — find more signals of quality and originality so its results are of higher quality and relevance. ..... Segal’s story looks like a failure of search, Google, and the internet. The internet made it possible for a bad guy to win. Well, so does Wall Street.

Jeff Jarvis: October 2007: BusinessWeek: Dell Learns to Listen In June, 2005, I unwittingly unleashed a blog storm around the computer company.... "Dell sucks." .... Thousands of frustrated consumers eventually commented on and linked to my blog, saying, "I agree." .... the Dell Hell posts onImage by www.dld-conference.com via CrunchBase my blog, which used to come up high on a Google search for the company, are now relegated to second-page search-engine Siberia..... the company is starting wikis that users can edit together .... a fundamental shift in the relationship of customers with companies. Dell and its customers are collaborating on new forms of content and marketing, but note that they are doing this without the help of media and marketing companies..... "co-creation of products and services" .... "I'm sure there's a lot of things that I can't even imagine, but our customers can imagine"

BusinessWeek: Who's Afraid of Apple, Google, Facebook?Timothy Wu, the Columbia University law professor who coined the term "net neutrality" .... Wu argues that just as AT&T was a monopoly during an earlier phase of communications history, companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple now hold what he calls "information monopolies" that could be just as damaging to our society. ..... For most of us, avoiding the Internet's dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world. ..... search is "owned" by Google, while Facebook owns social networking, eBay rules auctions, Apple "dominates online content delivery," and Amazon owns online retail. .... Facebook seemed like an also-ran just a few years ago ..... the ubiquity of the Web arguably makes monopolies more difficult to maintain, not less.

The Guardian: The internet's cyber radicals: heroes of the web changing the world The invention of the web is comparable to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450. .....the web .... the most powerful harbinger of social change the world has ever seen .... the telegraph, in the 19th century, inspired rampant technophilia. "The telegraph was the first technology to be seized upon as a panacea," he has written. "It was soon being hailed as a means to solve the world's problems. ..... In the 90s, when it still was in its swaddling clothes, revolution meant building a website brandishing the word "REVOLUTION!" in flashing red Comic Sans capital letters on a bright yellow background. ..... The Chinese government is the most infamous of web censors, but there is evidence that even its Great Firewall is collapsing at its foundations. ..... there is great respect among the modern cyber-radicals for the scale of attention that newspapers and TV can bring